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The Significance of Space in Occupy Wall Street*

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The Significance of Space in Occupy Wall Street* Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 5 (2): 499 - 524 (November 2013) Hammond, Space in OWS The significance of space in Occupy Wall Street1 John L. Hammond Abstract The relation to space is an important aspect of some social movements. Several dimensions of that relation were salient to Occupy Wall Street: it occupied a space that, by virtue of being at the heart of the US financial system, symbolized the corporate financial control that was the target of the movement's grievances; by occupying a space continuously, day and night, it made itself visible to all who wished to see it and offered a pole of attraction to those who identified with it; it provided a territory in which occupiers could attempt to construct a community based on principles of horizontality (complete openness of participation and no formal leadership) and prefiguration (attempting to forge in the present the non- alienated social relations to which they looked forward in a future, transformed society); and it engaged in confrontation over the occupation of space with the forces of order, both the police and the New York City administration. All these were fundamental aspects of the movement and contributed to its visibility. When the occupation was evicted, though the movement continued to inspire a great deal of activity, it lost its momentum and the attention of the public. Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for emphasizing the possession of space over its programmatic goals; but if there had been no occupation, there would have been no movement. On September 17, 2011, a few hundred demonstrators gathered in lower Manhattan and prepared to occupy Wall Street, the symbolic heart of the US financial system. Because they had made no secret of their intentions, it was heavily guarded, so they proceeded to a nearby privately owned public space called Zuccotti Park and set up camp. The occupation inspired a nationwide movement that spread with amazing speed to 1500 places around the US and elsewhere. The New York City occupation, the first and biggest occupation, remained the center, attracting people from all over. It challenged the US financial system which, according to OWS, exercises undue power not only in the economy but over national politics as well, making Wall Street the preferred target rather than the national capital. These occupations were inspired by a massive wave of protest that was convulsing the world: first, Iran's abortive Green Movement protesting electoral fraud in 2009; then the Arab Spring that spread from Tunisia in 2010 to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and elsewhere in 2011; the occupation of the state legislature in Wisconsin protesting the curtailment of public employee unions; the indignados in Spain and the Greek protests 1 This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Workshop on Reclaiming Democracy, Centre for Studies in Social Justice, University of Windsor, May 2013. I appreciate the helpful comments of the conference participants, Jill Hamberg, Peter Marcuse, Eduardo Romanos, and Lesley Wood. 499 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 5 (2): 499 - 524 (November 2013) Hammond, Space in OWS against austerity. In all these protests, the tactic of occupation was deployed in a new way. Demonstrators occupied an outdoor public space (except in Wisconsin), proposing to remain indefinitely, day and night, in defiance of public authorities who declared their presence illegal, until some demands were met. The occupiers of Zuccotti Park had a similar agenda except that they deliberately refrained from making any demands even as their manifestoes denounced financial institutions' control of US politics and the escalating inequality of wealth and income. Though occupations have a storied history in factories, farmland, and protest encampments outside of city centers, the size, persistence, and central location of these occupations were something new and garnered them worldwide attention. The occupations of 2011 did not all have the same objectives. Those of the Arab Spring sought to bring down authoritarian governments; those in Europe protested austerity; Occupy Wall Street (in New York and in its offshoots around the United States) was directed at the financial system and economic inequality. But there were important similarities beyond the similarity of tactic. In each country young people, facing grim or (at best) uncertain economic prospects, took prominent roles; electronic social networking media were used to recruit them; occupying a common space for several days or weeks, the occupations developed at least incipient organizational structures that were nonhierarchical and promoted an egalitarian, non-alienated form of interaction (I will later call these characteristics "horizontality" and "prefiguration"). Observers in each country were astonished by the size of these occupations, their staying power, and the eruption of demonstrations inspired by them across a wide area of their respective countries and beyond. As an element of the repertoire of political protest, the occupation illustrates the importance of space in the analysis of social movements. The contemporary analysis of the social significance of space begins with Henri Lefebvre (1991), who argued that space must be understood as more than a neutral container of activity. Space is actively produced, not only in its physical disposition but its social meaning, by the activities that go on in it, or that go on in some spaces but not others. Some have argued that Lefebvre overemphasized the production of space by capital as a means of social control: "Rather than locating struggle at the center of the analysis it is capital as producer of abstract space that is placed center-stage" (Herod, 1994: 686; cf. Stillerman, 2006). But his contrast between abstract and concrete or "lived" space brings contestation over space to the fore: as rulers attempt to turn space into abstract space, devoid of particular properties and amenable to social control, subordinates construct counter-spaces in which they strive to maintain their attachment to particular localities and assert their right to determine the activities that go on in particular spaces (Lefebvre, 1991: 33-40; Juris, 2012: 269).2 A relation between 2 Some scholars follow Lefebvre but deviate from his terminology, by restricting the term "space" to abstract space and contrasting it to "place," which corresponds to Lefebvre's concrete space (e.g. Dirlik, 1999; Escobar, 2001: 156; Merrifield, 1993). In this paper I have followed Lefebvre's usage of "space" to apply to both. The term is evidently a source of confusion; even Lefebvre's usages are multivalent. 500 Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 5 (2): 499 - 524 (November 2013) Hammond, Space in OWS territories subject to the control of different groups is "not just a matter of lines on a map; it is a cartography of power" (Massey, 2005: 85). Through a subordinate group's challenge to a ruling group's claim, space is socially produced: contestation in and over space changes the space itself (Lefebvre, 1991: 381-83; cf. Moore, 1997: 88). It is in that context that the importance of space for social movements becomes visible. All social movements are organized in space, but some movements are about space: who possesses particular spaces, who is entitled to be present in, control, and perform what kinds of activities in those spaces (Tilly, 2000; Martin and Miller, 2003; Schwedler, 2012; Sitrin and Azzelini, 2012: 94-101). The occupation differs from most social movements by its concentration in a particular location. As Peter Marcuse explains, "When space is occupied by the movement, it gives it a physical presence, a locational identity, a place that can be identified with the movement that visitors can come to, and where adherents can meet" (2012: 16). According to David Graeber, an early organizer of OWS, "the great advantage of Zuccotti Park was that it was a place where anyone interested in what we were doing knew they could always come to find us, to learn about upcoming actions or just talk politics" (2013: xi). In Lefebvre's terms, the space is concrete, experienced by its inhabitants as lived and uniquely identified with the activities that occur in it. An occupation, Marcuse continues, "also has a second function: it is an opportunity to try out different forms of self-governance, the management of a space and, particularly if the physical occupation is overnight and continuous, of living together" (2012: 16). Two more aspects of being in a specific location are worth noting. First, what Charles Tilly calls symbolic geography (2000: 137): the choice of location symbolizes something about the movement; it is not normally (and certainly not in the case of Occupy Wall Street) chosen at random. Locations carry meanings, and those meanings can telegraph the message that the movement wants to convey. Second, in some contexts the concept of "occupation" carries the connotation of opposition to a hostile force. Military occupations are meant to conquer a territory and subdue an insurgent or enemy population. Occupation by a social movement, on the contrary, aims to liberate space to allow a population to act in it in defiance of authorities' attempt to subdue and exclude them. So the connotation of confrontation remains but is inverted. But, to some degree contradictorily, the occupation is also likely to claim legitimacy on the basis of a concept of public space: occupiers are claiming their right to determine the use of a space formally designated as available to the public. Occupation is therefore an exercise of freedom of speech and public communication, a practice of democracy with the implicit or explicit claim that the public authorities are violating democratic principles by preventing occupiers from exercising their rights. Occupations therefore involve confrontation with the forces of order, especially the police forces charged with containing any threats to public order and licensed to use force to do so.
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